Ariston of Chios

« Ariston of Chios (early to mid 3rd century BC) The Greek philosopher Ariston (alternatively Aristo), from the Aegean island of Chios, was an exceptionally independent-minded member of the early Stoic school.

A pupil of the founder Zeno of Citium, he was among the most prominent philosophers working at Athens in the mid-third century BC.

He concentrated on ethics, dismissing logic and physics as irrelevant.

Like many contemporary philosophers, including Zeno, Ariston undoubtedly saw his own views as the ones most authentically capturing those of Socrates.

Virtue he considered a unitary intellectual state, its conventional fragmentation into kinds being misleading at best.

He resisted Zeno's doctrine that nonmoral desiderata like health, although indifferent, were naturally 'preferable'.

Total indifference to them, rather than rationally choosing between them, was the true goal of life.

He rejected rules of conduct - much favoured by Zeno - as founded on the same mistake of treating indifferent things as if they could be ranked in terms of intrinsic values.

1 Life and work Ariston of Chios was, during much of the third century BC, as important a figure in the Stoic school at Athens as Zeno of Citium , its official founder and his own teacher.

But very little is known about Ariston's life.

Probably he was Zeno's pupil in the early years of the third century, outliving him by a substantial period and perhaps well into the second half of the century.

Ariston's interests were almost entirely ethical, although there is some evidence of an interest in poetics, and possibly even in grammar.

He stayed much closer to Cynic ethics (see Cynics) than Zeno himself did, and in the long run it was the differences between the two that were most noticed.

The later Stoic tradition chose to revere Zeno but not Ariston, and, because history is written by the winners, Ariston has come to be seen with hindsight as a marginal and heretical figure.

This was certainly not so in his own day, when his impact at Athens was enormous.

For example, Arcesilaus, who had led the Academy into its sceptical phase (see Academy), appears to have engaged in debate with Ariston at least as much as with Zeno.

Ariston's own pupils included a leading Stoic Apollophanes, and the celebrated scientist Eratosthenes.

Ariston was an acute observer of contemporary philosophy, and his mock-Homeric line of verse about Arcesilaus as a philosophical chimera ('Plato in front, Pyrrho behind, Diodorus in the middle') became famous (see Arcesilaus §1).

What is harder to know is how far the later tradition may have exaggerated or even invented doctrinal differences between Ariston and Zeno.

But there seems little doubt that some of these were real.

During Zeno's lifetime, open disagreement with him was apparently acceptable in the school.

After Zeno's death (262), however, his thought became canonized: Ariston's independence now began to look like heresy.

It was probably at this stage that he set up his own school, said to have been in the Cynosarges gymnasium outside the city walls of Athens. Ariston is reported to have written a number of works.

The titles of fourteen are listed by Diogenes Laertius in a short biography of him. Some later Stoics disputed the authenticity of most of these, attributing them instead to the Peripatetic Ariston of Ceos, with whom Ariston of Chios certainly is sometimes confused in ancient sources.

However, there is a good chance that all or most are genuine.

They include Chreiai (a typically Cynic collection of moral anecdotes), Dialogues, On Zeno's Doctrines, Against the Orators and Against the Dialecticians.

A further work, Comparisons, was a collection of Ariston's graphic philosophical similes (look out for some below).

Ariston objected to Zeno's tripartite philosophical curriculum, consisting of logic, physics and ethics.

Echoing Socrates (Plato, Apology 19b-c), he dismissed physics as 'above us'.

Dialectic, the formal study of argument, and hence a mainstay of the branch called 'logic', Ariston likened to cobwebs (technically complex, but useless), to quicksand, and to eating crabs (lots of bones, little nutriment).

He judged these parts of philosophy - as also much of the traditional Greek educational curriculum - an irrelevance to what really mattered in life: moral knowledge. Consistently with this, his own important contributions were in ethics.

2 Indifference Socrates had argued that most things conventionally judged good or bad, such as health and illness, are in themselves neither, since they only get their value from the way they are used. Health and sickness wisely used are great goods, while unwisely used they are great evils.

The consequence, that only virtue or wisdom is good, only vice or folly bad, while everything else is morally 'indifferent', was widely endorsed in the fourth-century BC Socratic tradition, including Cynicism.

Zeno's innovation (see Stoicism §15) was to rank the indifferents on a scale of natural preferability, while continuing to call them indifferent.

He also, in consequence, attached enormous importance to rules or 'precepts', as offering indispensable guidelines to a proper choice among the indifferents, and thus a start towards the goal of 'living in accordance with nature'.

Ariston fought a rearguard action against this dilution of Socratic/Cynic values: indifferents really are just that, indifferent.

He denied rules any moral value.

And in place of Zeno's formulation of the goal, he described it as 'living with a disposition of indifference towards what is intermediate between vice and virtue, not retaining any difference at all within that class of things, but being equally disposed towards them all'.

He is said to have formed his view when, during Zeno's illness, he attended the lectures of Zeno's old Platonist teacher Polemo (see Platonism, Early and Middle §1 ).

Paradoxically, Polemo himself was attacking Zeno from the other direction, for refusing to call such items as health and illness 'good' and 'bad'.

No doubt Polemo argued for a straight choice: either such items are good and bad, or they cannot be valued relatively to each other at all.

While Polemo took the former option, Ariston was persuaded by the latter.

Ariston's fundamental objection to rules of conduct seems to have been as follows.

Typical precepts ('Don't get drunk', 'Look after your health', 'Avoid enslavement' and so on) misleadingly attach preferential value to items such as sobriety, health and freedom, which are in themselves totally indifferent and are worthy of choice purely according to circumstances.

It was as if in spelling one were to favour some letters as intrinsically preferable to others.

Rules of conduct, he concluded, have no place outside the kindergarten.

Ariston's rejection of rules has led some to call him an 'intuitionist'; and he is indeed reported as saying the sage will do 'whatever comes to mind' (Cicero, On Ends IV 43).

But we also know that, as a Socratic, he held that virtue is an intellectual state - knowledge of good and bad (although also called 'health', that is, of the soul) and that in place of rules he recommended reliance on 'doctrine'.

He therefore must have thought correct moral decisions were arrived at by reasoning, not intuition.

The serious problem that confronted him was, rather, how non-moral decisions should be made.

If public image, comfort and so on are literally indifferent, how can we make such trivial decisions as which clothes to wear or which food to eat? Yet if we could not choose, we would wear and eat nothing.

It was almost certainly to answer this that Ariston's appeal to intuition came in.

If the objection was that the Aristonian sage will, like Buridan's ass, starve to death through inability to choose between indifferents, Ariston's answer was that in such situations it is rational simply to do the first thing that comes into your head.

3 Virtue Since virtue is simply a matter of knowing good and bad, it becomes hard to see how it can have distinct parts, species or branches.

In the wake of Socrates (see especially Plato's Protagoras and Socrates §5), every Socratic philosopher defended some version of his thesis of the unity of the virtues. To some (for example, Chrysippus: see Stoicism §16) this meant no more than their inseparability, but Ariston was one of those who took them to be literally one and the same thing.

Why then do they have different names? His answer was that the very same state of mind was named differently according to the circumstances in which it was located.

In situations of danger, for example, knowledge of good and bad was called 'courage'; in situations involving appetite, 'self-discipline' ( sōphrosynē), and so on.

It was, he said, as if one were to vary between calling the power of eyesight 'white-seeing' and 'black-seeing', according to the objects it happened to be confronted with. Chrysippus devoted a treatise to refuting Ariston on this issue.

The clear implication is that the different species names of virtue are superficial and accidental, misleadingly fragmenting what is in reality a unitary intellectual power.

This disdain for conventional distinctions was characteristic of Ariston, and did much to give his pronouncements their strongly Cynic flavour.

Consider his striking assertion of cosmopolitanism: 'A native land does not exist by nature, any more than does a house, a field, a smithy or a doctor's surgery.

Each one of these comes to be so, or rather is so named and called, always in relation to the occupant and user.'. »